Northern Chile, with its dry mountains and clear skies one of the most suitable places for astronomical observations, will welcome the largest astronomical camera ever built in the world in hopes of revolutionizing the study of the universe.
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The device is the size of a small car and weighs 2.8 tons. It will be installed on a telescope under construction and will allow it to scan the sky like never before, according to those responsible for the U.S.-funded project.
The giant camera, which costs around $800 million, will take its first images in the first half of 2025. Every three days she will scan the sky, repeating the movement endlessly.
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We will “go from studying one star and all the deep physics of that star to studying billions of stars at once,” says Bruno Dias, president of the Chilean Astronomical Society (Sochia).
“It will be a paradigm shift in astronomy,” assures Stuartt Corder, deputy director of NoirLab, the American research center that manages the observatory at an altitude of more than 2,500 meters at Cerro Pachon, 560 km north of the capital Santiago.
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With this project, Chile consolidates its position in astronomical observation, since, according to the Chilean Astronomical Society, a third of the world's most powerful telescopes are installed on its territory.
The LSST camera (Space-Time Research as a Legacy for Posterity) is expected to have data from twenty million galaxies, 17 billion stars and six million space objects in ten years.
Scientists will have a renewed catalog of images of the solar system, be able to map the Milky Way and make advances in energy and dark matter research.
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300 televisions for one picture
The device will have a 3,200-megapixel digital sensor and to view any of its images will require more than 300 mid-sized HDTVs combined.
The California-made device will triple the capacity of today's most powerful camera, the Japanese 870-megapixel Hyper Suprime cam. It will also be six times more powerful than NoirLab's current most powerful camera.
The telescope that will integrate it has a mirror with a diameter of 8.4 meters. The 40cm telescope, which came to Chile more than 60 years ago when the country's first international observatory was installed on Cerro Tololo in the 1960s, is long gone.
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“This telescope came here on the back of a mule because there was no road,” explains Stephen Heathcote, director of the Cerro Tololo Observatory, located about twenty kilometers from Cerro Pachon.
The capital of astronomy
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, named after the American astronomer who discovered dark matter and will house the giant camera, is one of Chile's most important astronomy centers.
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The natural conditions in the country's northern desert areas, located between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, provide the purest skies in the world thanks to low cloud cover and a dry climate.
Chile is home to the telescopes of more than thirty countries, including some of the most powerful astronomical instruments in the world, such as the ALMA Space Telescope or the Extremely Large Telescope, the most powerful optical instrument ever built, which from 2027 will observe distances never before achieved.
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Although other countries such as the USA, Australia, China and Spain have also installed powerful observation devices, “Chile is unbeatable in the field of astronomy,” says the president of the Chilean Astronomical Society.